Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @12:03AM
from the book-of-the-medium-length dept.

New submitter hguorbray writes "One of my favorite Sci-Fi authors of all time, Gene Wolfe, will be honored with the Damon Night Grand Master award at the Nebula Awards weekend in San Jose this weekend. This Thursday night he will be doing a reading and Q&A along with Connie Willis (author of the Doomsday Book, Blackout/All Clear, etc.) at the San Jose Hilton. There will be a mass book signing event Friday including these authors and many others presented by San Francisco's Borderlands Books."
Here are this year's Nebula Award nominees. The awards will be presented at a ceremony starting 7pm ET on Saturday.

He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next book.

If you have not read him, do it. The Book of the New Sun is a literary masterpiece independent of genre. But he wasn't a one hit wonder, Home Fires (his latest) is amazing. Gene Wolfe is the kind of author that puts most pieces of "literary" fiction to shame. He not only deserves this award, but a Pulitzer too. To bad literary community can not remove its collective head from its ass. Cheers to him and I can't wait for the next book.

His skill as a writer is really astounding, that's what I love about his work. No slouch in the pure imagination department, either, but the wordsmithery and depth of his craft really set him above so many SF writers. And let's not forget that he played a crucial role in creating Pringles, [livejournal.com] too.

Nope just SF, Gene Wolfe has never written in the fantasy genre although some of his books appear to be.

Part of the genius of Gene Wolfe is the way he makes fantasy ambiguous - for example Soldier in the Mist. Where fantastic things happen, but the protagonist has brain damage, so the objective reality of the fantasy cannot be guaranteed.

Devil in a Forest is another good example. Neither of these works are what I'd call SF, however. At best, they'd be historical fiction.

Nope just SF, Gene Wolfe has never written in the fantasy genre although some of his books appear to be.

Peace is a fantasy work (the workings of the plot are based on magic and the supernatural, not technology). Most would have the same opinion about There are Doors and Castleview. Wolfe has indeed written fantasy.

Just because they have unreliable narrators does not make them science fiction when the plot depends entirely on magic and the supernatural. Gene Wolfe has written both science fiction and fantasy. The assertion above that he has not written fantasy is just plain wrong.

Wolfe, besides his outstanding writing talent, has an equally brilliant imaginative streak. If you get a copy of Endangered Species it contains four stories in the Thag sequence.

The hook in these stories is that people can leave the universe and live Not In Nature, or NIN. (This has nothing to do with Nine Inch Nails.) It's an alternative to dieing. Going outside of nature means you can travel in history, but that includes fiction and myth as well as time travel. The only time I ever encountered a similar

When I was very young Gene Wolfe would occasionally come by the house, as he was friends with my parents. I knew he was a writer like my father, but being so young my only real recollection is that I thought he had a cool name.

Wolfe is a better writer than 99% of everyone who's been published in fiction, including most literature authors. Since he writes science fiction though, most University professors would never recommend him. It's too bad that their prejudice places a whole field of fiction in the "unworthy" category.

As Peter S. Beagle, and others, have observed in essays - the prejudice against fantastic literature in academia and "serious" criticism is an anomaly that arose in the early 20th Century, and is largely confined to the U.S. Throughout almost all of history literature based heavily on fantastic elements was the norm, and was commonly accepted even after "realistic" literature became a mainstream phenomenon.

The prejudice is very ethnocentric. "Magic realism" from Latin America is lionized, but the literary e

The prejudice is very ethnocentric. "Magic realism" from Latin America is lionized, but the literary equivalent by an English speaking writer is ignored or worse.

Interesting point. In Peter Wright's collection of Gene Wolfe interviews, there's one where the interviewer asks what Wolfe thinks about science fiction, fantasy and magical realism, and Wolfe answers "magical realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish".

The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the

I've not read Dunsany, but I'm willing to read him with an open mind. Lovecraft was certainly an excellent stylist at times, though inconsistent (probably depending on how fast he had to bang out the work for money).

The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the apparent source of this prejudice - he despised Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft - really all recent or contemporary fantastic literature being written in English (if it was old enough, Swift for example, it might get a pass).

I think critics' low opinion of some of those authors was deserved, because while those authors were masters of world-building, they were not masters of prose style. Their use of the English language feels flat and unimaginative. In spite of the rich detail of Middle Earth, Tolkien's prose, for example, is just as much uncreative aping of English epic writing as the Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith's aping of the King James Bible.

Valid points - Tolkien's prose is uneven in quality, and parts of LOTR are quite leaden, but the delightful Hobbit, for example, is entirely free of Saxon epic styling. But Wilson's dismissal was all encompassing, and drew few distinctions among these hated fantasists.

Lewis was better, over all, than Tolkien. But Wilson's attack on Dunsany, Lovecraft, and James Branch Cabell simply shows him as a pretentious fool. The fact that the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century Jorge Luis Borges (one of those Spa